QotD

"One way to introduce a course like this would be to promise you that by reading these books and by debating these issues you will become a better more responsible citizen. You will examine the presuppositions of public policy, you will hone your political judgment, you will become a more effective participant in public affairs. This would be a partial and misleading promise.

"Political philosophy for the most part hasn't worked that way. You have to allow for the possibility that political philosophy may make you a worse citizen rather than a better one. Or at least a worse citizen before it makes you a better one. And that's because philosophy is a distancing (even debilitating) activity.

"And you see this going back to Socrates [...]

"[...] philosophy distances us from conventions, from established assumptions, and from settled beliefs. And those are the risks, personal and political.

[...]

"... the very fact [these questions] have recurred and persisted may suggest that though they are impossible in one sense, they're unavoidable in another. And the reason they're unavoidable, the reason they're inescapable, is that we live some answer to these questions every day... just throwing up your hands and giving up on moral reflection is no solution."

-- professor Michael Sandel [copied from longer passage quoted at The Obligate Scientist; also in a clip shown on the PBS television program Charlie Rose, 2009-10-12]